Headache, Eye Strain, and 2000 Fever

I have two fully packed development machines at the office weve playing with since before the official release. My notebook here, which is not, a development machine weighs in at over 2300 DLLs alone. All three of these machines have yet to present me with the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH or any of those other Microsoft related symptoms. There are one or two quirks on the notebook. But that is because it only has Windows 98 drivers for those affected components. Microsoft and Windows 2000 itself will tell you that the use of some Win 98 drivers can make the system unstable. Though I havent seen anything other than a message telling me to get a W2K driver from the manufacturer of the hardware.

In fact, on the development machines I have intentionally run code that has taken down my NT4 Server and the rest of the network. W2K kept on running even though the program running in the Visual Basic IDE crashed taking VB with it. This is a great thing for our development teams would have to reboot several times a day under Win 95 when playing with API calls.

Dan Appleman Im not. So when I play around with API calls you can tell I served in the U.S. Marine Corps by the weird language coming from my cubicles. Maybe I just havent hurt those machines bad enough yet with the right API goof. I do know that I havent seen any bugs in W2K let alone the 60,000 plus bugs that everyone has been talking about in the press. But when have they told the truth in the last 8 years?

I have to say that I now understand why they broke from the original NT5 plan and concept which was to have the NT5 (W2K) workstation version replace win 95 & 98. The replacement to Windows 98 is a variation of W2K being referred to as Millennium is NT with a heavier reliance on hardware specific code instead of a fully platform portable C code. (Ive seen a beta copy. Just what I need for more sleepless hours.)

This is for the gaming world I would guess and that is a big factor for the home market. But I fear that security is the bigger reason. Thats right. W2K is the system administrators dream. But on the home front there are not SysAdmin people and I cant see the normal everyday person going nuts with having to set permissions, options etc, etc, etc. They dont need all that security.

Where as in the Enterprise environment the admin boys are having a hay day. You pick an option they can control it without leaving the bowels of their secure complex in the basement somewhere. The group policy will rule. But programmers have no fear. Some of us have figured out how to get at our tools anyway. That dreaded REGEDIT will not be kept from the programmers no matter how hard that pesky Administer tries to keep it from us. Thats right we got hold of the registry codes for the POLEDIT program. If need be we can write that program to stop the policy refresh rate from shutting down the tools. At least I think I got all 131 pages worth of the system registry codes.

Do I sound sick? If it were only so simple? I have been sick with similar fevers before. No; this is something else. But what could it be?